Shirley M. Phillips knew she wanted to be a pilot when she was fourteen years old, and at a time when only 2% of professional pilots were women, her decision to pursue aviation set her on an unexpected and arduous path. But despite obstacles in her way, Shirley flew planes for over forty years and now she is sharing her remarkable story in the upcoming memoir ‘How Not to Fly an Airplane: A Female Pilot’s Journey‘, out now.
‘How Not to Fly an Airplane’ is about learning to fly before you are old enough to drive a car, and teaching others when you are nearly always mistaken for being the pilot’s girlfriend, wife, or daughter. It’s about finding a sense of identity as a twin, becoming the first pregnant pilot at an airline, and losing a friend and former student in an infamous plane crash. It’s about the many mistakes you can make in an airplane, and what it’s like to solve them, thousands of feet in the air or just a few feet above the trees.
The multiple fatal airline accidents that have happened in recent months are not only horrible tragedies, but highlight an issue that the aviation industry has had for decades regarding blame in the wake of these accidents.
“Both the pilot and air traffic control community understand that it takes a meticulous look at all the circumstances present at the time of the crash to understand why an accident occurred,” says Shirley in a recent essay for Women Writers, Women’s Books.
“They know that prematurely pointing to a single explanation for the crash does a disservice to all controllers and pilots because it oversimplifies the complex set of conditions under which they must do their jobs.”
‘How Not to Fly an Airplane’ is told through Shirley’s wide-ranging experience in over four decades of flying and she hopes it will inspire more women to pursue careers in aviation. It is a memoir for anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to fly, and inspiration for anyone who has felt compelled to do something nobody thought they could do. We hope you will be inspired by the excerpt shared with us below
I was a twenty-two-year-old flight instructor the first time a student pilot surprised me in a big way. She was a new student in the glider with a cavalier approach to her flight training that belied a tendency to make bold and impulsive movements with the control stick.
One of the early lessons involved learning about aerodynamics so I asked her to fly at a slower speed than normal. To slow down, she needed to raise the nose by applying some back pressure on the stick. Most student pilots cautiously raise the nose a little bit at a time and see what happens.
My student yanked the stick all the way back into a vertical climb like she was trying to do a hammerhead. At the same time, she pushed down hard on the left rudder pedal with her foot, most likely to get more leverage on the stick. The combination of these two moves set us up perfectly to enter a spin.
As the left wing dropped and the right wing slowly rose, we started corkscrewing in what seemed like slow motion toward the ground. All I could think about was that this glider was not approved for doing intentional spins, not because it couldn’t get into one, but because it might not come out of one.
It had the aura of an out of body experience as I watched an apple orchard directly below us grow bigger through the glass canopy. My student, true to form, seemed not at all concerned. I put the stick and rudder pedals into the position recommended for “inadvertent” spin recovery and waited. Neat rows of apple trees became a few green canopies of trees, and then one tree’s green leaves with red apples interspersed throughout.
The tight circle we were making slowed until it eventually stopped, leaving us diving at the clearly visible apples on one tree, while quickly picking up speed. As I firmly pulled back on the stick so that only sky filled the canopy, I glanced to my left to assess my student’s reaction. She looked bored.
This is one of the flight lessons I used from my personal experience to train pilots who were becoming flight instructors. Flight instructing is one of the few things you can do to earn the flying time necessary to move on to becoming an airline or corporate pilot outside of the military.
Most pilots with only civilian flight experience become flight instructors soon after they earn their commercial pilot’s certificate. It’s unnatural in a way because it means that many of the instructors who are training new pilots are the least experienced commercial pilots. It’s not the way it’s done in many other parts of the world, but it’s still the way we do it here in the United States.
That is why I would share this story when teaching new instructors because it is an example of how a flight instructor must always be diligent when teaching others. This is especially true for those rare but scariest of all student pilots that make big moves as if you, the instructor, can get them out of anything. Thankfully most student pilots are more cautious than this student was, but it’s safest to assume that they are all out to kill you—even if unintentionally.
When I first became a flight instructor at the age of twenty, I was often asked if I actually “flew in the airplane with students.” I thought it was an odd question, but I guess the image of me teaching someone else how to fly was hard to imagine. They also might have thought that I taught things that pilots needed to know, like weather or navigation, from the safety of a classroom while someone else who looked like Charles Lindbergh got to teach the stuff that happens thousands of feet in the air.
I also could pass for a thirteen-year-old girl, in my pigtails and T-shirts with funny sayings on them, which was far from looking like Tom Cruise in a flight suit.
What no one ever asked me was what I had to do to become a flight instructor. I could have told them how becoming a flight instructor was harder than flying in circles while trying to lower the landing gear with a contraption that looked like the old pull starters on my father’s lawnmower—something I had to do once on a checkride. Becoming a flight instructor was difficult because flying the airplane was one thing, but explaining how to do it while demonstrating it was quite another.
I found flight instructing awkward at first. The airplanes I was flying had no intercom so everything I needed to convey had to be done at a high enough volume to be heard over the engine noise. I was not used to talking loudly because my mother suffered from debilitating migraine headaches after she fell ice skating and fractured her skull when I was ten.
I dared not raise my voice above a whisper after I was told that my mother would end up in a psychiatric hospital if I was too loud. It’s not surprising when my instructor first told me to loudly yell “clear” out the window before I started the airplane to warn anyone who might be near the propeller, I struggled to do it. And when I had to yell directions at him during instructor training to be heard over the noise of the engine, it felt doubly wrong.
My fascination with flying started early. I was in the second grade when my teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, asked us to write a few sentences about what kind of animal we would be if we could choose just one. Without hesitation I printed I want to be a bird so I can fly. Seven years later, at the age of fourteen, I took my first flying lesson.
I didn’t know then that the first female pilot for a major U.S. airline had been hired just one year earlier. I’m not sure it would have deterred me from becoming a commercial pilot even if I knew how few women flew airplanes for a living. Even at a young age, I never felt like my pursuits were limited by my gender. I can trace the source of that understanding back to Christmas morning in 1968, when my identical twin sister, Sherry, and I were five years old.
That Christmas my mother bought us toy toolkits so we could help our father build a bookcase in the garage. Inside the shiny white and red metal boxes were some nails, a small hammer, a miniature saw, and a few other items of interest to an aspiring carpenter. Our mother grew agitated as she stared at the toolboxes. On the front lid was a picture of a young boy staring lovingly at his father, with a caption that read, “For a boy to help his dad.”
“Don’t pay attention to that,” my mother said, clearly exasperated, in contrast to her usual festive mood on Christmas morning. “Girls can use hammers too,” she said with a defiant tone in her voice that surprised me.
My mother was an unlikely feminist.
About Shirley M. Phillips: Writing has been a constant in my life even as the plans for my future had to change. I started taking flying lessons at the age of fourteen after my father bought me a ride in an airplane. I flew by myself at sixteen before I had my driver’s license. When I became a flight instructor one of my first students was my father. My first piece was published in AOPA Pilot about my first engine failure at the age of 23.
I flew for a small regional airline until they went out of business the same week I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. I took an unplanned break from flying since the airlines were not hiring and my second daughter was born with a rare genetic disorder. My writing focused on parenting a child with disabilities while I volunteered with several organizations.
I returned to school and worked as a pediatric physical therapist with babies from birth to age three while teaching my daughter how to walk. I wrote about my strong-willed daughter who was predicted not to live past her first year. Later I returned to aviation as a simulator instructor on the Airbus A320 for a major airline, and as a professor of aeronautical science.
My flying career ended when I developed a chronic health condition. Writing helped me deal with debilitating pain and the challenges of being a patient. I wrote my memoir ‘How Not to Fly an Airplane’ while earning a MA in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. My strong-willed daughter who was not supposed to live is now 31. I am working on my second book about navigating the health care system as someone with a disability.
